Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series eBook

EXTRACTS FROM SERIOUS REFLECTIONS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS.

BY “OUR POLITICAL ORPHAN.”

The Bombay Gazette Press, 1881.

No. XXXIV

THE TEAPOT SERIES

SOCIAL DISSECTION

[January 5, 1880.]

GOSSIP I.

MY DEAR MRS. SMITH,

I cannot understand why Mrs. Smith, with her absurd
figure—­for really I can apply no other
adjective to it—­should wear that most absurdly
tight dress. Some one should tell her what a fright
it makes of her. She is nothing but convexities.
She looks exactly like an hour-glass, or a sodawater
machine. At a little distance you can hardly tell
whether she is coming to you, or going away from you.
She looks just the same all round. People call
her smile sweet; but then it is the mere sweetness
of inanity. It is the blank brightness of an empty
chamber. She sheds these smiles upon everyone
and everything, and they are felt to be cold like
moonshine. Speaking for myself, these eau-sucre
smiles could not suckle my love. I would languish
upon them. My love demands stronger drink.
Mrs. Smith’s features are good, no doubt.
Her eyes are good. An oculist would be satisfied
with them. They have a cornea, a crystalline
lens, a retina, and so on, and she can see with them.
This is all very satisfactory, I do not deny, as far
as it goes. Physiologically her eyes are admirable;
but for poetry, for love, or even for flirting, they
are useless. There is no significance in them,
no witchery, no suggestiveness. The aurora of
beautiful far-away thoughts does not coruscate in them.
Her eyelids conceal them, but do not quench them.
They would be nothing for winking, or tears.
If she winked at me, I should not jump into the air,
as if shot in the spine, with my blood tingling to
my extremities; my heart would not beat like a side-drum;
my blushes would not come perspiring through my whiskers.
Her winking would altogether misfire. Why?
Because her winking would be physiological and not
erotic. If you ever learnt to love her, it would
not be for any lovelight in her eye; it would never
be the quick, fierce, hot, biting electric passion
of the fleshly poets, it would be what a chemist might
call the “eremacausis” kindled by habit.
Mrs. Smith’s tears are quite the poorest product
of the lachrymal glands I have ever seen. They
are simply a form of water. They might dribble
from an effete pump; they might leak from a worn-out
mashq.[AA] I observe them with pity and regret.
Their drip has no echo in my bosom; it produces no
stalactites of sympathy in my heart.